1. Technical Field
The invention relates to printing. More particularly, the invention relates to production planning and monitoring in digital inkjet printing systems.
2. Description of the Background Art
The digital printing process is becoming more and more automated. All steps from the ordering until the delivery of the print product are linked together and monitored by an MIS system. Apart from this, it is necessary to handle the customer requests as carefully as possible to avoid mistakes and additional production runs to be able to deliver the product in the requested quality on time. This requires that all involved subsystems stay connected and get the correct job related information together with the job without the need for additional user interactions.
Production planning and scheduling systems, such as EFI's PrintFlow product (Electronics For Imaging, Inc., Foster City, Calif.), are widely used in the analog and toner based printing world. These systems optimize the production process and thus avoid waste and delays because of their capabilities for planning demand, monitoring status, and reacting to changes from the requirement side (new incoming orders, priority changes) or from the production (device) side.
In the wide format, super wide format or, more generally, in the ink jet world this kind of technology is not usable because known printing devices do not have the capability to communicate actively current device and job status, display the job order in the way it was scheduled from a planning and scheduling system, and react in the requested way if the order of the print jobs changes. Furthermore, current RIP engines which are implemented between production planning and scheduling systems and the inkjet printer do not have the capability to react in response to a demand from the scheduler to move printing jobs from one device to another.
The above described situation makes it very difficult to monitor the status of production in real time. It is not possible to see remotely if and which job a printer is printing, or if the printer is in print preparation, in maintenance mode, out of order, etc. Furthermore, any short time adjustments in the print order are very time consuming and require direct interaction. This is especially true in the case where a printer is out of order for a while and, as a result, the daily production must be rearranged, which requires a significant amount of direct communication and monitoring from the print shop owner or supervisor.
Further, changing the media on a roll printer is time consuming and a certain amount of extra media is typically required to wind and tack the media at the winding roll. The same is true if a printer has to be switched from one ink set to another. Also, this requires some time for print preparation and typically also includes an extra purge or other additional filling steps which affect the ink consumption.
Status updates have the same problem. Either there is a manual procedure which requests that the printer operator enter the status of a particular print job, at least issue a signal that it is printed, or there is only the option to request the job status in verbal or written form. A request to move urgent jobs from one inkjet printer which is heavily used or in maintenance for the moment to another available ink jet printing system requires a similar, time consuming, and error prone communication effort between all involved persons, i.e. administrator or supervisor, RIP operator, and printer operator.
Further, a typical digital print shop uses a paper based job ticket for each and every job to produce its print product. This job ticket is a document that includes high level parameters, such as the name and address of the customer, the name of the content file, the requested media, and certain job related definitions, such as the output size or the number of copies. The specific production parameters which are set at the digital printing press are affected by the skill set of the printing press operator. Thus, the quality and/or color of the resulting print product, is very much related to the settings that the printing press operator makes to the printing press.
All of these limitations make an optimization of the print production related to specific parameters or rules impossible.